The Sustainable Construction Leaders (SCL) peer network, available through Building Green and based in North America, is a community with regional ties that shares best practices, advocates for, and inspires change in a way that is collaborative, non-competitive, trusting, positive, and results-oriented.  It aims to leverage the construction industry to combat climate change and create healthy environments.

Contractors are uniquely positioned to impact the sustainability of building projects. In preconstruction, contractors impact the design of a building by providing feedback to designers and clients. They influence product and material selection through the submittal process. Finally, contractors control how a project gets built, including the equipment that’s used, how construction waste is managed, and the extent of surrounding site and landscape disturbance.

Developed in conjunction with JLL and the Forum’s Real Estate CEO community, the Green Building Principles: The Action Plan for Net Zero Carbon provides a clear sequence of steps to deliver net-zero carbon buildings and along with globally applicable guidance on implementation.

Constructing new buildings and sites with the least possible environmental impact involves three important steps: reduce, renew and offset. Offsetting means calculating the project's carbon footprint so it can be balanced by funding resources or activities like renewable energy and land protection — resources that benefit and protect the planet.

Cradle to Cradle Certified® is the leading multi-attribute standard used globally across industries by designers, brands and manufacturers for designing and making products that enable a healthy, equitable and sustainable future. For more than a decade, Cradle to Cradle Certified has been helping companies to innovate and optimize materials and products according to the world’s most advanced science-based measures.

The Global LCA Data Access network (GLAD) is the largest directory of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) datasets, from independent LCA database providers, from around the world.

OpenLCA is an open source and free software for Sustainability and Life Cycle Assessment, with the following features:

In North America, the Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings is the only free software tool that is designed to evaluate whole buildings and assemblies based on internationally recognized life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology.

WoodWorks offer two calculators that can quantify the benefits of building with wood, which sequesters carbon, instead of materials with high embodied carbon such as steel and concrete.

• Carbon Estimator - to be used if you don't have full information on the volume of wood used in the building
• Carbon Calculator - for more accurate calculations where the wood products used and specific building type and size can be entered.

Tally is a life cycle assessment (LCA) tool that enables calculation of the environmental impacts of building material selections, directly in an Autodesk® Revit® model.